A smooth WordPress project starts long before anyone touches a theme or a plugin. This checklist walks you through what to decide and prepare so your new site launches on time, within budget, and ready to support real business goals, not just “look nicer than the old one.”
If you’re planning a new WordPress site or a major redesign, it’s very easy to jump straight into colors, templates, and “cool features.” That’s also how projects drag on for months, run over budget, and launch with missing content or broken funnels.
The numbers tell a sobering story: research shows that 37% of projects fail due to a lack of clear goals, and organizations waste 12% of their resources due to poor project management. When it comes to technology projects specifically, large IT projects run 45% over budget and 7% over time while delivering 56% less value than predicted.
You don’t have to become one of those statistics.
This article is a practical checklist you can work through before you hire anyone. It pairs well with our Complete WordPress Maintenance Guide for 2025, which explains how to keep the site healthy once it goes live, and our article on WordPress maintenance pricing, which helps you think about long-term costs.
Use this as a planning document you can share with your internal team.
Step 1: Clarify What The Website Should Actually Do For Your Business
Before you think about layouts or plugins, decide what success looks like.
Research consistently shows that projects with clear, structured approaches are 2.5 times more successful than those without. Yet many businesses struggle with this fundamental step.
Are you primarily trying to:
- Generate qualified leads
- Sell products or services directly
- Book appointments or demos
- Educate and nurture prospects
- Raise donations or community support
Write down one primary goal and one or two secondary goals. Then add a few success metrics. For example:
- 20 qualified form submissions per month
- 10 booked intro calls per month
- 30% increase in online quote requests
- A specific donation or sales target per quarter
If your only real goal is “look more modern,” you’ll have a hard time making decisions during the project. Clear, measurable goals help ensure that 82% of organizations meet their project objectives, while those without clear goals face significantly higher failure rates.
Step 2: Get Specific About Your Audience And Positioning
A good WordPress build isn’t just a collection of pages. It’s a guided experience for the people you want to reach.
Write down:
- Your primary audience: for example, local homeowners, B2B buyers, nonprofit donors, parents, or patients
- Any important secondary audiences: partners, vendors, job applicants, media
- The main problems they want to solve when they visit your site
- Why they should choose you instead of a competitor
This information shapes your homepage, your service pages, and your calls to action. It also helps you decide what belongs in the main navigation and what can live deeper in the site.
Understanding your audience is particularly important given current browsing trends. As of 2024, approximately 63% of global web traffic comes from mobile devices. Your content needs to work seamlessly for users on phones, tablets, and desktops.
Step 3: Map Out Your Content And Pages
Many projects stall because content is “still in progress.” A simple content plan up front can save weeks.
Start by listing your core pages. For most small businesses this includes:
- Home
- About
- Services (with one page per core service)
- Industries or use cases, if relevant
- Locations, if you serve multiple areas
- Blog or Resources
- FAQ
- Contact
For each important page, note:
- The main goal of the page
- The actions you want visitors to take
- The questions that page should answer
This creates a basic site map you can sketch on paper or in a simple document. It should be very clear how a visitor moves from the homepage to a service page, then to a form or booking step.
If you already have a site, decide which pieces of content should be migrated, which should be rewritten, and which can be archived.
When you’re thinking about content, you can also think ahead about AI visibility and SEO. Our AISEO guide explains how structure, clarity, and internal links help tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity understand and reference your content.
Step 4: Gather Brand Assets And Visual Preferences
Design goes much faster when you have your brand ingredients ready.
Collect:
- Logo files (preferably in SVG or high-resolution formats)
- Color palette and any existing brand guidelines
- Font preferences, if you have them
- Photography you like and have permission to use (team photos, product shots, environment)
- Examples of websites you like, and a short note about what you like in each one
Also make a short “avoid list.” For example:
- No auto-playing background video
- No full-screen sliders
- No tiny light gray fonts on white backgrounds
Clear preferences at the start mean fewer rounds of “can we move this slightly to the left” later. With WordPress powering 43.1% of all websites and over 60,000 plugins available, the possibilities can be overwhelming. Having clear brand guidelines helps you make faster, more confident decisions.
Step 5: List Features And Integrations Before You Sign A Contract
It’s much easier to include features in the initial scope than to bolt them on at the last minute.
Make a list of:
Must-have features:
- Contact forms and quote forms
- Newsletter signup
- Online booking or calendar integration
- E-commerce, donations, or payment forms if needed
- Blog or resources section with categories and tags
Nice-to-have features:
- Live chat or chatbot
- Advanced search
- Member or client portal
- Downloadable resources or gated content
Then list your integrations:
- CRM (for example, HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive)
- Email marketing platform (for example, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign)
- Analytics and tracking (GA4, Google Tag Manager, pixels)
- Any review platforms or third-party directories
If you run on another CMS now or you’re considering non-WordPress options, that’s worth addressing early. We talk through the pros and cons of non-WordPress platforms in our article on whether we maintain or build non-WordPress sites, which can help you decide if WordPress is actually the right choice for this project.
Given that WooCommerce powers roughly 28% of all online stores and is the second most popular e-commerce platform globally, WordPress remains an excellent choice for businesses that need both content management and e-commerce capabilities.
Step 6: Plan For SEO And AI Visibility From Day One
SEO isn’t something you sprinkle on the site after it’s built. Good structure and content choices at the start make it easier to rank and to show up correctly in AI tools.
Do some basic work in advance:
- Write down 5 to 10 important keyword phrases that real customers would use, including local phrases like “service + city”
- Decide which service pages those phrases belong on
- List common questions prospects ask in sales calls and turn them into FAQs
- Think about one or two educational topics you could cover regularly in your blog or resources section
When you combine this with a clean site map, you have the foundation of a content strategy that supports both Google and AI discovery. Research shows that organic traffic accounts for 53.3% of a company’s revenue on average, making SEO one of the most important investments you can make in your website.
Our AISEO guide goes into more detail about making your site “AI ready,”.
Step 7: Decide On Budget, Timeline, And Internal Responsibilities
A realistic budget and timeline are just as important as the design.
Budget
You don’t need to know an exact dollar amount, but you should decide on a range. For example:
- Entry-level brochure site range
- More advanced lead generation or e-commerce range
- Room for ongoing maintenance, support, and occasional improvements
Our maintenance pricing article can help you understand what to expect after launch, so you can separate “build budget” from “owning and maintaining the site” budget.
Timeline
Write down:
- Your ideal launch date
- Any hard deadlines, such as product launches, events, conferences, or grant cycles
- How flexible you are if content or approvals take longer than expected
Given that 78% of projects go over budget or experience timeline delays, building in some buffer time is helps you get a realistic timeline.
Internal Responsibilities
Every project needs someone who will:
- Provide content or review drafts
- Approve designs and key decisions
- Deliver assets such as photos, logins, or documents
- Test the site before launch
If you assign these roles inside your team ahead of time, you avoid the “everyone thought someone else was handling that” problem. Research shows that inadequate project planning is the number one reason for project failure, and clear role assignments are a critical part of solid planning.
Step 8: Prepare Your Vendor Questions
Once you have your checklist filled out, you’re in a much stronger position when you talk with agencies or freelancers.
Here are some questions you can ask WordPress providers:
- How do you approach performance optimization and Core Web Vitals for new builds?
- What is your standard process for security, backups, and updates after launch?
- How will our team update content on our own?
- Do you build on a staging site first?
- Who owns the site, code, and content when the project is complete?
Your goal isn’t to interrogate anyone. You want to find a partner whose process matches the way you like to work.
If you want to see how we think about performance and security in more detail, you can read our guide on speeding up WordPress without changing hosts and our walkthrough on how to perform a WordPress security audit.
Step 9: Plan Pre-Launch Checks And Long-Term Care
Before launch, someone should verify:
- All forms work and send to the correct inboxes
- Tracking is installed and tested
- Redirects are in place for old URLs that have changed
- The site looks and works correctly on phones, tablets, and multiple browsers
This last point is particularly important given that mobile devices account for 71.8% of e-commerce traffic and mobile-optimized sites have 62% higher conversion rates than non-optimized ones.
After launch, you’ll need a plan for:
- Regular updates of WordPress core, themes, and plugins
- Backups and backup testing
- Security monitoring and vulnerability management
- Ongoing content updates and small improvements
WordPress releases roughly 40 major versions to date, with regular updates for security and features. Staying current isn’t optional—roughly 13,000 WordPress websites are attacked every day, making maintenance and security monitoring essential.
If you want a deeper explanation of what that looks like, The Complete WordPress Maintenance Guide for 2025 breaks this down into daily, weekly, monthly, and annual tasks, and explains when it makes sense to do it yourself versus hire a maintenance partner.
Step 10: Turn This Checklist Into A Working Document
The simplest approach is to copy these sections into a document and answer each one with short bullet points or paragraphs. You can then:
- Share it with your internal team to get alignment
- Attach it when you request quotes from agencies or freelancers
- Use it as a reference during the project when decisions come up
If you decide to work with us, this is almost exactly the information we will ask you for during our discovery process. Because you have it prepared, the project can move faster and stay closer to your original goals.
Ready to start planning your WordPress project? Contact us to discuss how we can help bring your vision to life with proper planning, execution, and ongoing support.
Remember: companies that monitor key performance indicators are almost twice as likely to hit growth targets. By working through this checklist before your project begins, you’re already putting yourself in the successful half of that equation.